Check out my other stories here on nairaland:
The untamed beast:
https://www.nairaland.com/2239855/untamed-beast-short-horror-story

Terror at sea: https://www.nairaland.com/1257095/terror-sea-true-life-inspirational

I hope u like d story..........
This is a story about something that happened to me a few years back. I haven’t told many people, and those who I did tell dismissed me out of hand. So now I come to you, the internet. Sure, most of the people who read this account won’t believe me. But I still cling to the hope that someone out there will take me seriously. Maybe someone has had a similar experience. Anyway, that’s enough rambling. Here’s my story.

I grew up in a small town in Restigouche County, New Brunswick. For those of you who don’t know, the area is a cool, mountainous region of Canada known for its beautiful forests and rivers. And it lives up to its reputation for natural beauty; the rolling hills, golden shores and lush woods make it a pleasure to explore in the summer. However, being fairly far north, it cools down quite a bit by early autumn, which is when the event I’m about to describe took place. As I said I grew up in a small, friendly town, and we didn’t have much in the way of “Haunted houses” or urban legends. But one town over, a few miles down the road, there was an old Victorian era mansion that was said to be haunted by the spirit of a woman. I had always heard the story growing up, but by the time I was about 12, I had stopped believing in ghosts and other such nonsense. But I’m getting ahead of myself; I should explain the legend as it was told in our area.


The spirit was known to local kids as “Old Nan” or “The Shrieking woman”. Some people who thought it was all bullshit would dismissively call her “Screaming Granny”, while shaking their heads at the foolish people who believed in her. Now, the details of the story vary depending on who you ask, but here’s the most common version: during the 1800s, there was a local outbreak of pneumonia one winter. There were some other sicknesses like colds and flus going as well. It was a cold, snowy year and everyone spent their days huddled inside – perfect conditions for a disease to spread. Couple that with the poor hygiene and primitive medicine of the time, and it’s no wonder that people started getting sick. The doctor in town – and yes, there was only one – was extremely busy treating the sick and trying to slow the spread of the disease. He went up to a large house on the outskirts of town, trekking through the snow and icy winds, to check on the family that lived there.


Now, the history of this family was tragic enough already: the man who owned the house had died several years earlier of an unknown medical condition. His wife, distraught at losing her beloved so suddenly, had run away to America in the hopes of starting a new life, leaving her three young children in the care of her mother. The last anyone heard of her she was a drunk living in the slums of some American city, though no one can agree which city it was. I should stress that the details of this tale are hard to verify and that I am merely explaining the story as I heard it growing up. Anyway, by the time this outbreak of pneumonia hit, the three kids were in the care of their grandmother, a kindly old woman who tried her best to hold what was left of her family together. When the local doctor made his way up to the house, which was outside of the main settlement, he was relieved to find no signs of disease in the family. He explained that due to the high rates of sickness in town, and the difficulty of journeying to their outlying house in such inclement weather, he wouldn’t be back for at least a week. He was satisfied that the inhabitants of the house were healthy, and as long as they stayed home they couldn’t contract any disease.

Of course, the doctor had neglected to consider that he might have carried the pathogens from his patients in town up to this family. This turned out to be the case, for even though the doctor had not fallen ill himself, he must have been carrying some sort of bacteria or virus when he visited the family on that cold, bleak day. He spent the next week or so working almost without rest to treat the ill and dying in the town, and during that week it snowed every day. It was one of the harshest winters on record. But the doctor kept his word, and as soon as he could, he made his way back up to the old house outside of town where the grandmother and three children lived. Apparently it took him four hours just to walk through the snow that lay thick upon the road, though at least the blizzard had finally stopped.

When the doctor arrived, he knocked on the door. He received no response, so he knocked again, calling out to the old woman. Again there was no answer, so he let himself in. I don’t know if the door was locked or not, but he got in somehow, and what a terrible sight he found. He first walked through the kitchen, seeing utensils and old food strewn about haphazardly. The furniture was in disarray. Now very concerned, he made his way into the dining room and gasped in horror: there, in her favourite rocker, sat the kindly old grandmother, but she was a hideous mockery of her former self: covered in blisters and cysts, with her skin a pale gray colour. Her eyes were bulged and glassy and her nostrils were flared. Perhaps most disturbing, however, was her mouth. Her lower jaw hung open at an impossible angle. Her few remaining teeth, yellowed and worn with age, jutted out of her now bluish and shriveled gums at odd angles. The doctor felt her hand. She was frozen. She had obviously become very ill and passed away, and with no one to tend the fire, the house had become frigid, freezing her disease-riddled corpse.

The doctor got up and ran up the stairs screaming for the children. He burst into the nursery to find two bluish, unmoving forms. He began to weep as he tried hopelessly to resuscitate one of the children, but was surprised and relieved to find that he actually began to stir. The child was frostbitten and ill, but still clinging to life. His sister was less fortunate; she had frozen almost as solidly as her grandmother. The third child was missing. It is presumed that he tried to go for help in the blizzard and froze to death on the way, though since a body was never recovered, no one could be sure. The surviving child was delirious and could not remember where his brother had gone. This one fortunate boy was nursed back to health and eventually he was adopted by the doctor, who felt immense guilt at having carried the fatal disease to the small family. The old house was never lived in again.Anyway, that’s the story as it was told to me in my childhood, and it persists to this day. But I have yet to touch upon my own experience with “Old Nan.

To be continued shortly......................

Come and finish dis story now........